Angels Don't Sleep Here: (2002. dir: Paul Cade) If you look up Paul Cade on IMDB, he has this one credit, as writer/director, and that's it. As far as I can glean from a cursory search, he's a successful Canadian artist, who made this one foray onto the backlot, then skedaddled back north of the border.
This movie is one of the unfortunates. You can see that Cade cared about it initially, had some fun writing it, and somewhere it just went horribly awry. First of all, whenever you have a "thriller" involving identical twins, what's the one "twist" we know for a fact we can count on? The kids are going to switch identities at some point; it's not a twist, because we know it's going to happen. Secondly, it's as if he wrote it with multiple ideas for who the bad guy was, and flipped a coin to choose one, but any character you choose to be the mysterious psycho-killer-in-black can't possibly be in all the places the psycho-killer is supposed to be when s/he's supposed to be there, particularly not the human who ends up unmasked (literally) as the psycho-killer. Which brings us to the third point, which is that the editing is lousy, in that it takes us from a scene in which two people are fighting straight to a scene in which they're fine, or from a scene in which two people are new co-workers to one in which they're talking as if they've been sleeping together for some time. Never mind about the continuity errors, like a photograph that hasn't yet been taken showing up on the psycho-killer's wall, or the detective exploring the psycho-killer's den wearing yesterday's suit.
The acting is generally good: Kelly Rutherford and Kari Wuhrer in particular carry the sorry-assed female roles with grace and aplomb. Roy Scheider fails sadly in a truly thankless task as the evil mayor (a guy who, on the eve of an election, knocks a cup out of a beggar's hand right in front of a camera crew and nobody bats an eye). The guy who played Bobby in Twin Peaks has the lead and I came away without an opinion about him one way or the other. Channon Roe (you'll recognize Roe from his millions of television roles; I recognize him as the undead bully from the Buffy episode where Xander has his own adventures while the rest of the scoobies are saving the world from imminent apocalypse) gives it a good solid try in another thankless role as the cast-off lover of the assistant DA (who is also the evil mayor's daughter and the ex-girlfriend of the dead twin. We never, incidentally, see the real DA. This girl and her factotum seem to comprise the entire office).
The best part of the movie is (surprise!) Robert Patrick, who gets to wear some excellent suits and brings the only real life to the proceedings as a bent cop. The sole satisfying mystery in the piece, in fact, lies in trying to pin down exactly how bent he is. Does he harbor a secret heart of gold which will out in the end? Will he betray the evil mayor in whose pocketbook he currently resides? Is he truly helping our ostensible hero unravel the enigma of his long-missing twin brother, as he claims? or is he just the crooked opera-lover he appears on surface?
My final gripe is for the cinematographer: set the damn camera down, will you? If you don't want to show us this story, then why are you making the damn movie in the first place?
*SPOILER ALERT*
Body Language: (1995. dir: George Case) When Robert Mitchum first lays eyes on the lousy dame who's going to steal his heart, distract him with kisses, then set him up for a sucker's fall, he knows her from the get-go, and goes along with it anyway. Tom Berenger, on the other hand, is an overpaid lawyer who gets bullied, brutalized, seduced, and set up in the most obvious frame that film has ever seen, by the most obvious no-good femme-fatale on celluloid, and he's utterly clueless from beginning to end, so you can't really feel sorry for him as he slides down his slippery slope into the bed he sat and watched being made for him. This was made for television; it's what they used to call an Erotic Thriller. Which means, like, the lawyer and his trashy stripper do it in the aisle of a K-Mart store. Is that really a fantasy fulfilled for someone? Bathed in the glow of the blue-light special?
Anyway, Robert Patrick is her boozed-up, trailer-trash, chopper-riding husband, and, if you know the genre from which this is gracelessly drawn, then you'll know that she wants him dead, for her own sociopathic reasons. We don't meet him until we're a third of the way in (and most of us are half-asleep), and even then we see him mostly in long-shot until his climactic fight-scene. Which, by the way, he ought to have won, because there's no way that wussy-pants lawyer dude is going to take out Robert Patrick, unless it's specified in the script, which I guess it was.
Survey says: by-the-numbers neo-noir with enough strip-joint footage for titillation and glowing neon lights for street-cred and very little at all to recommend it.
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